Love and Data: Stephanie Dinkins and Lisa Nakamura

Join us for an afternoon of critical conversation with transmedia artist Stephanie Dinkins and leading scholar of race and digital media Lisa Nakamura. Presented in partnership with MOCAD, this special event celebrates the launch of Love and Data, Dinkins’ new monograph and a powerful call to reimagine technology through the lens of care, equity, and justice, rather than extraction and bias. Moderated by Srimoyee Mitra, Director of Stamps Gallery and editor of Love and Data,

Dinkins works with emerging technologies, including AI, to spark dialogue around race, gender, aging, and what she describes as our ​“future histories.” Her innovative practice, currently featured in the exhibition Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art, reclaims storytelling as a vital form of data, positioning memory, myth, and cultural knowledge as algorithms in their own right.

In conversation with Nakamura, this event will explore how new technologies shape our social realities and how art can challenge dominant techno-cultures. Together, they’ll reflect on Dinkins’ wide-ranging work and consider how data and digital tools might better serve Black and marginalized communities.

The event will include a book signing with Dinkins following the discussion. Love and Data will be available for purchase onsite.

Biographies

Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who creates experiences that spark dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Her work in AI and other mediums uses emerging technologies and social collaboration to work toward technological ecosystems based on care and social equity. Dinkins’ experiences with and explorations of artificial intelligence have led to a deep interest in how algorithmic systems impact communities of color in particular and all of our futures more generally. 

Dinkins teaches at Stony Brook University, where she holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art. Dinkins is a Mozilla Rise25 Awardee (2024), a Schmidt AI 2050 Senior Fellow and LG_​Guggenhiem Award winner named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI(2023).

Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the founding director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan and has been writing about digital media, race, and gender since 1994. She has written books and articles on digital bodies, race, and gender in online environments, on toxicity in video game culture, and the many reasons that Internet research needs ethnic and gender studies.

Nakamura is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (2008), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (2013) and is co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (2013). Recent and forthcoming books include Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal (2024), and The Inattention Economy: Women of Color, Digital Labor, and the Internet (2025).

Srimoyee Mitra is an award-winning curator and writer whose work is invested in building empathy and mutual respect among diverse through exhibitions, discussions and publications. She has worked as a curator and art writer in Canada and India and published widely in journals and exhibition catalogs. author of Border Cultures (2015), Stephanie Dinkins: On Love & Data (2024). She is the Director of Stamps Gallery, part of Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan.